Month: June 2018

I intended to include this in my post about reaching 100%, but that turned into a story about sneaking into a base armed with trousers.

So here’s the mini-review I was going to include with that.

The good: Controls and gameplay are (for the most part) deliciously smooth, and this strongly complements the organic gameplay possible- attacking a military fortress as a super-soldier with high tech gear plays as fluidly as ambushing an outpost wearing nothing but a pair of trousers. I ended up enjoying the story, but that’s going to be variable for others.

The bad: It’s only 2/3 complete, thanks Konami! Why do I have to stare at the Boss in a chopper every time I want to do something from the ACC? The grind for 100% was tedious, though optional. The animations and controls, while smooth were on occasion a bit slow- I kept getting into AA emplacements rather than fultoning them; and during certain fights, dodging some attacks failed because snake wanted to lie down or/or crawl instead of dive-dodge.

The ugly: At this point I’m not sure if Hideo Kojima is trying to illuminate/draw attention to sexism/misogyny etc, but uh, there were some highly questionable bits.

I finally got there! I have mixed feelings, as I no longer have an excuse to load the game up and mess around; but on the other hand I am happy to be done with some of the slog.

Even towards the end, after a hundred hours the game could still surprise me. I’ll give you a quick example: I was attempting a Subsistence mission (where you start with nothing but a pair of trousers and your wits). Some careful sneaking at an outpost netted me an AK and a bit of ammo, and so armed I went for the main objective- a small base that served as a radio relay station. I dispatched their forward patrol non-lethally and made my way through a pass that lead to a ledge directly above the base.

I do like the non-lethal approach, which has been consistently rewarded by other titles in the Metal Gear series. My normal approach would be to methodically and silently tranquilise the various patrols and guards without arousing suspicion; but with my only ranged weapon being unsilenced this wasn’t an option. Could I lure the guards somewhere secluded and incapacitate them? Perhaps! I made a bit of a movement on the ledge and the guard decided he would run the several hundred meters around the hill and through the pass to get to me. A quick bit of CQC and one down! Okay it took a few minutes but the theory was solid. Another guard was similarly lured.

There my plan stalled. No matter what wild, strange dance I did on that ledge, I couldn’t attract anyone’s attention. It being night probably didn’t help. There was nothing to do — aside from firing my gun, but that would have attracted a little too much attention — but drop down into the base proper. I was able to knock out another guard when I got the harsh musical sting and slowmo (which will forever belong to Max Payne in my head) meaning someone else had seen me. What’s more, they were too far away to silence before the brief window that lets you prevent a full-blown alert closed. Whoopsy.

I was determined to roll with the punches. Even if the punches were in the form of many automatic rifle rounds to the not-armoured-trousers.

So, there was a full-blown alert! I ducked behind the small building housing the objective (some radio comms equipment), peeking out to exchange fire. I soaked up a bit of damage — trousers are not as good armour as you might think — and was seriously considering reloading from checkpoint. But by this point in the game I had already achieved the S rank for the mission (which generally depends on either speed or being super-stealthy or both) so I was determined to roll with the punches. Even if the punches were in the form of many automatic rifle rounds to the not-armoured-trousers.

Combat was faring less well than I hoped. The guards were well-armed and well-armoured. Ducking around one end of the building was rewarded with a warning of a missile lock on me (!), and the other had a shotgun/machine gun duo who were surprisingly effective. I was low on health, low on ammo and lacking a weapon that dealt sufficient damage to those who wished to do me harm. Then I was thrown a bone.

Warning: Sandstorm approaching

A very windy, sandy bone; but a bone nonetheless. Sandstorms limit visibility to about 2 feet, so this was an opportunity to scarper. Which I did, in the direction of a nearby mortar.

In the nigh-on 100 hours of gameplay, I don’t think I’d used a mortar before. They just didn’t mesh terribly well with the whole stealthy-and-non-lethal approach I so heavily favoured. As I could still see marked enemies in the sandstorm, I was able to take out most of the guards that had previously been gunning me with great effect. And some of the guards I hadn’t spotted before and couldn’t see through the sand. And some of the radio transmitters. And the anti-air radar.

Mortars are great!

After that finishing off the last few non-mortally-wounded (or is that non-mortarily-wounded?) soldiers and completing the objective was a relative breeze.

MGSV:TPP had many of these moments, when things didn’t work out the way they were planned; but the outcome was even better than expected.

It’s getting annoyingly grindy now! I spend most of the time in the chopper, either:

deploying to an area to put down capture cages then immediately leaving

returning to the medical platform on mother base to hand over photographs

The latter is especially irritating as there’s no indication that you need to do it, and you can’t give all ten photographs at once! So chopper in, run to room, cutscene into room, hand over photo, run back to chopper, leave; repeat.

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I have a sheet of paper that I’m crossing off the things as I do them. It’s slightly illegible due to my broken fingers, but usable.

The gods of irony got together with the gods of gaming after my recent gripe about having to do and redo things in MGSV:TPP:

Some missions have mutually-exclusive objectives – I’m looking at you, Backup, Back Down – so may require more

Well, I played through the “Extreme” version of Back Up, Back Down to do the additional objectives, and the team searching for the prisoner got there, stood around him and then… very kindly didn’t execute him.

So I ran up, stunned them all with a non-lethal assault rifle and fultoned him out! All optional objectives complete.

I’m getting close to 100% completion of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. I’ve completed the story (more on that in a follow up retrospective when I’m done) and achieved S-rank in all of the missions, which is easier than it seems at first glance. So I’m chasing the other things that need done:

achieve S-rank on every main mission

wait, I said this already, weren’t you paying attention?

complete 157 side ops

most of the time spent on this is taken on getting to the side-ops location; highly repetitive

capture / save a specimen of every animal

Can you say ‘fetch quest’? I thought you could!

complete all important combat deployments

click a button on the menu and wait? sure

collect all blueprints

should be achieved if doing all the other stuff anyway

collect all key items

similarly, most should be gained in the course of things, except the first aid kit (off the top of my head)

collect all 10 Paz photographs

all but one gained via side ops

complete all mission tasks

last but not least! practically speaking, this means missions need ‘around 3’ plays: first time its new, second time for s-rank, and third for the remaining objectives. Some missions have mutually-exclusive objectives – I’m looking at you, Backup, Back Down – so may require more

The final one is probably the biggest time sink; though the side ops come close. a rough guess, I reckon I’ve done all the mission objectives in at least 25% to 40% of missions, maybe more. Some of the objectives take a while, particularly the ones which involve following a target and listening to their conversations.

The Good

Playing without care for rank or speed generally means more fun! The optional objectives reward things that are a little more out of the way to do (like capturing patrolling armoured vehicles, or recovering a blueprint) but are in themselves rewarding.

But the most time-consuming ones, ‘listen to a series of conversations’ I’ve found the most interesting as they reveal more about the plot, so are cool in retrospect. Having completed the story, its a bit like rereading a book and going “oh, so that’s what they were foreshadowing!”.

The Bad

It’s a grind. Redoing things you’ve already done, watching the Boss (in the guise of whichever character) fly into the AO over and over again gets repetitive quickly. I’ve seen Hideo Kojima’s name in the credits more times than I count, though that’s in every mission a few times so is pretty repetitive in itself.

There’s also the nagging feeling that chasing a meaningless number in a game is a huge waste of life, but I try to push that to the back of my mind. I’m having fun!

The Ugly

There are occasional bugs; one mission (Lingua Franca) is prone it it. I’ve also had people/outposts/bases get spooked and never leave the heightened security state, necessitating a restart.

Am I still enjoying playing the game, even though I’ve completed the story? Yes, but only just.